Report on My Interviews

After conducting one interview (one more pending after scheduling difficulties), I have learned a lot about writing in psychology. Here, I explain the knowledge I gained from this interview.

1. What are the most significant or interesting genres that you learned about from your interviewees? Please identify at least THREE specific genres from your discipline/field of study that your interview subjects discussed writing within.

Journal Articles, Public Writing, and Books are the three genres identified by cecile McKee.

2. How do these genres differ from one another? Think about things like genre convention, content, purpose, audience, message, and context as you describe these differences.

Their differences focus mainly on their purpose. Books and journal articles are not ultimately intended for the general public, they focus on peer audiences. The context, purpose, and audience for journal articles are relatively consistent whereas they are much more malleable with public writing.

Public writing is designed to be accessible to more people. It is simpler, shorter, and more available. The context could change but the purpose is to inform and the audience is anyone interested in psychology.

3. Based on the information you gathered in your interviews, what is challenging and/or difficult about writing within these genres (from a professional's point of view)?

Books take so long to write that the information is essentially irrelevant by the time that  they are published. Journal articles are not very accessible to anyone not already involved in psychology. Public writing tends to be simpler and more generalized as the detail included in journal articles in books simply cannot fit into an online article.

4. Based on the information you gathered in your interviews, what is exciting and/or rewarding about writing within these genres (from a professional's point of view)?

A book allows the author to explore different ideas in depth and express all of his or her ideas. A journal article gives him or her similar freedom while still assuring some degree of relevance. Public writing allows the author to access a large number of people as express his or her ideas more simple and potentially more frequently.

5. Where in mass media - popular, academic, and/or social - can examples of this genre be found? If genre examples cannot be found within mass media easily, where can genre examples be found/located?

Many magazines, Twitter accounts, Instagram accounts, and Facebook accounts are dedicated to the dissemination of ideas about psychology. While these ideas are simplified for mass understanding and distribution, they come from these books and journal articles that psychologists put so much time and thought into. Psychology today, for example, has an account on all three of these social media sites as well as a magazine subscription.